Billionaire investor Chris Sacca told an amazing story about how obsessed Kobe Bryant is with being a successful investor in the startup world

In case there were ever any doubts about how Kobe Bryant plans to
approach his retirement, an anecdote from billionaire
investor and "Shark Tank" personality Chris Sacca
illustrated pretty definitively that it will be with the same
obsessive competitiveness that defined his basketball career.

Sacca said that a few years back, he reluctantly took a meeting
with Bryant because the basketball star wanted to
discuss some business ventures and the startup world. Sacca
told Simmons that he was skeptical about Bryant not only
because he wasn't a basketball fan, but because he had witnessed
many professional athletes treat business like tourism,
barely dipping their toes into the world and learning how it
works.

So I said, "Look, if you're serious about this, then prove it to
me." I said, "I'm going to send you a bunch of stuff that you
should read, a bunch of TED Talks andother
videos you should watch, and if you do your homework then I'll
talk to you about investing." It was funny because I didn't think
he was going to do it. I thought it was kind of a nice way to let
him off easy.

Bryant did not balk at the homework assignment:

So, sure enough, for the next few months my phone never stops
buzzing in the middle of the night.It's Kobe,
reading this article, checking out this tweet, following this
guy, diving into this Ted Talk, diving into the Y Combinator Demo
Day stuff. And I'm getting these texts, literally two or three in
the morning, and my wife is like, "Are you having an affair with
Kobe Bryant? What is happening here?"

In the end, Sacca became just as fascinated with Bryant as Bryant
was with the world of Silicon Valley:

It was just at all hours, and the guy was serious! He was
bringing the same obsessive work ethic to learning about startups
that he does to training, to rehab, to his thousand makes a day,
to everything. I was fascinated by it. So I ended up becoming
really enthralled by him because this is a very unique
personality type that I only kind of see in some of our very best
entrepreneurs.

Kobe Bryant is an untested rookie when it comes to
entrepreneurship, but his obsessive competitiveness
certainly suggests that he could be in for a prolific career.